A Reuters report recently said 33 blockchain projects announced over the past four years have yet to deliver on its promise.
NOT ACTIVE
Deloitte and technology startup SETL announced in 2016 that they had tested a card payment system based on blockchain. SETL said at the time that the service could launch as early as 2017. The system has not launched, SETL President Peter Randall.
An IBM and MUFG Bank project, announced in 2016, to build a blockchain system to manage contracts between the two companies is no longer active.
Australian Securities Exchange CEO Dominic Stevens said in May that the exchange expects to go live in 2021 with a blockchain-based technology to replace its over 25-year-old equities clearing and settlement system. The project, announced in 2016, is one of the most ambitious of its kind.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation expects to go live later this year with a blockchain-based trade information warehouse of cleared and bilateral credit derivatives. DTCC said in January 2017 it was working with IBM and startups Axoni and R3 on the project.
LAUNCHED
Non-profit advisory group American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS) has launched a system built on blockchain technology from IBM to help insurers streamline data reporting. The group generated a small report and one insurer is loading its data onto the blockchain, while others want to get started, said Joan Zerkovich, head of AAIS operations. But the system is a long way from being widely adopted and a handful of states still require that data be sent on paper, Zerkovich said.
In 2018 foreign exchange settlement provider CLS said its new blockchain-based payment netting service called CLSNet had gone live with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group. Since then, three other banks have joined the service, which was built with IBM, and more will be added this year, said Alan Marquard, chief strategy and development officer at CLS.
SOME ACHIEVEMENTS
HSBC has settled $250 billion (£194.15 billion) worth of forex trades using blockchain in the last year, suggesting the heavily hyped technology is gaining traction in a sector until now hesitant to embrace it.
The bank has settled over three million forex trades and made over 150,000 payments since February using blockchain, it said in a statement. HSBC would not give data on forex trades settled by traditional processes, saying only that those settled by blockchain represented a “small” proportion.
French retailer Carrefour has seen sales boosted by the use of blockchain ledger technology to track meat, milk and fruit from farms to stores and will extend it to more products to increase shopper trust, an executive said on Monday.
SOME DEALS
British insurer Legal & General has joined hands with Amazon to establish a blockchain system for corporate pension deals.
The insurer said it would use a managed blockchain system launched by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to handle bulk annuities, which involve Legal & General taking over companies’ defined benefit or final salary pension schemes.
Volvo Cars, owned by China’s Geely, has produced the first cars containing recycled cobalt mapped using a blockchain, and has joined a separate project to monitor cobalt from Democratic Republic of Congo, Volvo said.
